Spike Speaks

The Influential Director Addresses His Past, His Legacy And What He Wants In Future Film Projects.

August 15, 2004|By Roger Moore, Sentinel Movie Critic

MIAMI BEACH --Is it too early to be talking about Spike Lee's legacy?

Maybe, he says. It gives people an excuse to write him off, to speak of his career in the past tense. And he likes to work.

But he has all but invited that retrospective look. His new film, She Hate Me, echoes the title of his breakout hit, 1986's She's Gotta Have It. Like She's Gotta Have It, She Hate Me is heavily invested in sex and sexuality. Comparisons are inevitable.

And Lee is, after all, a man who has had a huge effect on the culture and his art form. He sees it in classrooms, where he teaches or lectures. He hears it from film students far and wide.

"He was the first filmmaker I'd ever seen who was willing to make movies that dealt seriously with racial issues," says Walter Clark, 20, a film student at the University of Central Florida.

"You'd see his movies and think, `He's a black man, making a statement nobody else is making at the movies, and I want to do that, too,' " says Chyrea Murdaugh, 32, who is studying filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts.

Tonya Sheffield, 39, wanted to make movies "after seeing She's Gotta Have It, the first movie about a black woman that I ever saw that felt true to me." Sheffield and Murdaugh are spending their summer learning the movie business on the low-budget horror film Sisters.

Lee says he still can't get used to this sort of testimonial.

"That's kinda strange," he says, rubbing his chin and flashing a Cheshire Cat grin. "These kids, coming up, knowing everything there is to know about me."

It comes up when he meets a new actor as he's casting a movie.

"You're black and you grow up in New York, you know Spike," says Kerry Washington, 27, the star of She Hate Me. "I remember sneaking off with my friends to see Jungle Fever the day it opened."

Lee sees it in theaters, in the deals announced for the black directors who followed him.

"It's a great thing when Clark Johnson gets to direct a S.W.A.T., or F. Gary Gray directs The Italian Job or the sequel to Get Shorty, or Antoine Fuqua is directing King Arthur," Lee says. "That's progress."

Because he remembers the days when he was out there, a lone black voice in the multiplex wildnerness. Sidney Poitier had retired from directing. The "blaxploitation" directors of the '70s, Melvin Van Peebles and Gordon Parks, were unable to find work behind the camera.

And here was Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee, a short, pushy, absurdly determined film-school grad with a hunk of his grandma's money, making his first feature film.

OUTSIDER FROM THE BEGINNING

"Oct. 4, 1984 -- I came up with the title for my next script -- She's Gotta Have It. . . I have to decide how explicit the sex scenes are gonna be. It can't be porn, but it has to be vicious."

-- from the production diary Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: Inside Guerrilla Filmmaking

Twenty years after starting work on his screen debut, Lee has survived being a perpetual outsider, survived his first great success, and even survived being written off. More than a few critics say he peaked with 1989's Do the Right Thing. Cultural critic Alan Stone, writing in The Boston Review, was moved to complain, "Since then, his films have begun to show signs of creative uncertainty and even amateurish confusion."

Entertainment Weekly famously dismissed him when he made the low-budget sermon Get on the Bus back in '96. Since then, he has made a documentary commemorating civil-rights martyrs (4 Little Girls) and an athlete (Jim Brown All American) and concert films (Freak, Pavarotti & Friends, The Original Kings of Comedy). He's had a Showtime series (S.F.C., Sucker Free City). But none of those projects has had the effect that his earlier movies did.

When you're hot, everybody wants your brand name. When you're not, you have to close your Los Angeles production offices, as Lee did last week. His 40 Acres and a Mule stores closed years ago.

Lee has come back to make more big studio films, including last winter's highly regarded The 25th Hour. But he's well aware that, 20 years on, his career is still dependent on the very latest box-office returns.

"I've never had a blockbuster," Lee says with a shrug. "So I've never had that proverbial blank check from Hollywood. Maybe they don't see me as commercial enough. Never have."

He looks it. The weight has gone up and down in his married years, though he's back in fighting trim now. The glasses are more stylish, the clothes more upscale. But there's still a lot of his first on-screen character, Mars Blackmon, in his 5-foot-5-inch frame.

Just don't look for the mellow family guy to don the Mars-Mookie-Half Pint guise again.

"I don't see myself acting again. I mean, never say never and all, but I didn't enjoy it. Kind of grew out of that."